They Wore Electricity Like Jewellery
Victorians looped little galvanic chains around their limbs and declared a polite tingle to be medical progress.Read More 
The Hagfish That Smothers Enemies With Slime And Knots
A jawless, eel-shaped recluse defends itself by pumping enormous quantities of slime into a predator's gills and then ties itself into knots like a prim, indignant mariner.Read More 
The Moon's Dust Does a Tiny Rebellion
The Moon has a fine, charged dust that actually lifts itself at sunrise and sunset, forming a ghostly horizon glow and tiny 'fountains'-and it behaves like a petty, aristocratic civil servant.Read More 
Do Not Beat Your Carpet in London
An 1839 Metropolitan law politely but firmly forbids beating rugs in the street, because Victorian civilisation could not abide a dust cloud.Read More 
The Pigeons Who Nearly Drove Our Missiles
A famed behaviourist trained pigeons to steer weapons by pecking at a projected target and the Navy eventually chose circuits over clucks.Read More 
Truffle Oil: The Aristocrat of Fake Smells
We pay a small fortune for an imitation perfume that smells like the idea of a truffle, not the real thing, and we applaud ourselves for being discerning.Read More 
The Great Boston Molasses Debacle
In 1919 a 2.3 million gallon tank burst and Boston discovered that molasses, like bureaucracy, is impossible to shovel politely.Read More 
Diogenes Lived In A Jar And Told Alexander To Move
He abandoned sofas, installed himself in a single enormous pithos, and famously told Alexander to 'stand out of my sun' with the kind of decorum only an ancient eccentric could muster.Read More 
When Greenwich Outsourced Zero Longitude and Lost a Football Pitch
The famous line at the Royal Observatory is not where modern satellites say zero is - GPS puts it about 102 metres to the east, and the resulting geography of pretension is delicious.Read More 
When Corpses Clock In: Welcome to the Body Farm
There is, rather splendidly, a university garden where donated dead people teach police how to stop being wrong about time of death.Read More
